Fold.com…Folds

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Well, the inevitable is starting to happen – a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back. Fold.com, an Ajax home page, has folded.

Perhaps Fold.com’s destiny was decided the day the founder picked the domain name for his new service, or perhaps the recent funding of two similar companies (Netvibes and Pageflakes) plus looming competition from Live.com and Google IG did them in. Either way, Fold.com is no more. Details are on the Fold.com blog – the founder is “busy working on other stuff”.

My original post on Fold.com was titled “Fold.com – Why?“. It was written during a period of time when a new Ajax home page was launching nearly every week. In that post I listed 12 Fold.com competitors, a sign that the market was saturated. One of those 12 competitors, Zoozio, has since changed both its name and its business model. Another, Wrickr, is yet to launch. The rest seem to be hanging in there.

Fold.com is now just a parked page at a domain reseller, looking for a buyer. Four letter, dictionary word domain names are valuable assets. I just hope the ghost of Fold.com doesn’t haunt the next service to brand themselves under this domain.

In anticipation of the inevitable thinning of new web startups, I’ve added the tag “DEADPOOL” to our Company & Product Index. Hopefully we won’t be using that tag too often in the near future.